Young the Giant kinda amazing

 

I've officially become a person that thinks about work at night and on the weekends, and it's not a fun place to be. "I've got so many things to do that I can't do any of them" has been my phrase of choice lately. I'm traveling tomorrow, and while I will bring my (personal) laptop with me, I don't think many blog posts are going to get written. So before I disappear for a few weeks again, let me tell you about Young the Giant, because Sameer deserves it. 

 

As dedicated followers of this page may know, I recently went to a concert featuring a different artist with a GIANT name. I really thought two concerts in a month might be overkill and I had reached my quota. Too many concerts. Too many giants. I really need to learn to spend time at HOME, I thought. But just five or six days in advance, I invited a friend and decided to go go go, and I'm very happy with how things turned out. 

 

The event was on June 20th in the Seaport District in Boston. Young the Giant (a music artist, if that wasn't clear) was the headliner, and the two openers were almost monday and Cold War Kids. 

 

In the last 1.5 years, I've gone to a lot of concerts at smaller venues that are mostly general admission/standing room only. This was an open air pavilion and it was entirely assigned seating, so it was a little bit jarring to me to see the openers singing in broad daylight with the audience sitting down for the most part. The crowd was also older than I was accustomed to. Just observations. 

 

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almost monday: I really liked the vibe of this performance. Very chill and mostly upbeat indie rock. They're touring again later this year, and I am planning to attend that show. You can come too. Here, listen to their most played song, can't slow down.

 

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Cold War Kids: I like some of their songs when they're playing in my car, but I just didn't really think much of this performance. I think the mismatch between the semi-unenthusiastic crowd and this band that took themselves a little too seriously felt weird to me. I will say, the lead vocalist, Nathan Willett, seems genuinely very talented. That man was SINGING, and then he started playing piano, and then I was like: whoa very impressed. I bet the other band members are also talented, but I have sung and I have played piano (not successfully at the same time though), so I will speak about what I know. Most notable song of theirs is called First, in case you have interest. 

 

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Young the Giant: About 2.5 hours after the event started when it was nice and dark, it was finally time for the headliner. At this point, everybody was standing, because these were the guys that they all came for (except for one person I met that flew two hours specifically for almost monday, but I bet he's the exception). 

 

This was a super choreographed show. They played a lot of songs, spent very little time talking, and there was a lot of smoke and fog and lights and camera and action. It didn't feel personal, but it did feel kinda epic. Sameer Gadhia (the lead singer) onstage literally looks the same as he does in all the Instagram ads for this show/album. There have been a few occasions where I feel like bands are just cosplaying rock stars and the performance doesn't match the vibe of the crowd, but Sameer genuinely seemed so cool, and he made me feel like I could be a rock star too. 

 

I like a handful of Young the Giant songs—that's why I went to the show. But I was surprised at how much more I liked hearing them live. I remembered that sometimes I really like music, and I really liked this music. Being around a bunch of fans was good energy too. 

 

Cough Syrup and Mind Over Matter are their most popular songs, and I enjoy both very much. 

 

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Over the weekend, I went to Bits & Bites in Saugus, MA: a Filipino bakery with many baked goods and drinks and a whole lot of Filipino food I can't eat. I want to go back there so baddd; I liked it. It took me until now to realize that it has a nerdy name, and that's the reason why I keep almost typing "bytes" into Google Maps when I search. I'm not the nerd; it's the bakery's fault. 

 

I also went to the Cheesecake Factory, but they don't need my free advertising.  

May 2026 in movies finale (Post #5 out of 5)

 

Ten Things I Hate About You (1999) - directed by Gil Junger - is a high-school romantic comedy based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. I would like to thank Shakespeare for being the inspiration for this movie that I like very much. He's a talented guy who deserves some recognition. 

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I finished the month of May by rewatching another favorite movie. I enjoy romantic comedies a lot, and I've watched a lot of teen rom-coms in particular, but there are a lot of crappy ones out there. It's very much a guilty pleasure; movies that I know are pretty bad, but some part of them makes me feel good, so I keep watching. 

At the same time, it's hard for a rom-com to stand out. I'm picky about them, because they only really need a few things:

1. Two leads with CHEMISTRY🧑‍🔬, and I want to know why they like each other beyond: hot 🥵

2. A logical plot. Don't make me feel like Spock. Maybe teen rom-coms are meant to make as little sense as teenagers do, but I made sense as a teenager (don't ask my mom to confirm). 

3. Be at least a little funny 🤏

 

Apparently, these three tasks are very difficult to accomplish.  

 

When it comes to English-language rom-coms in particular, there are not a lot of movies I can point at and say: that was actually really good, would recommend. But I love Ten Things I Hate About You. I think it's a good movie, it's well-paced, and it only makes me cringe once. Therefore it is the natural recommendation to friends that don't watch a lot of rom-coms. And in order to make sure it gets watched, I sit myself down on other people's couches and watch with them. 

 

The last four times I watched this movie have followed that same pattern. 

 

I'm not sure exactly what it is about Ten Things that has made it one of the more memorable rom-coms of my life and the one I want to share with everybody. Some possible reasons: I love the cast, and I actually understand why someone would fall in love with Kat Stratford. I understand why she would fall for The Joker too (I just want to understand things 😩). I like that things never feel too melodramatic or over the top. It's a chill movie for a chill Pratima. 

This movie was my introduction to Joseph Gordon Levitt, and he will always be Cameron to me, no matter how many Nolan movies he stars in. 

I re-realize every time I watch that there are a disproportionate amount of sexual jokes in here. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ They're funny. The gynecologist dad was a standout of this particular watch. I love that man; he's so good. 

I don't think Ten Things is perfect. It borders on being a bit too low-key, and it brushes past some parts of the conflict. But it makes me feel good every time I watch, and it's mature enough that I don't feel like I'm losing brain cells.

If you're intrigued by this rom-com but don't know when you'll get around to watching, never fear, Pratima is here! I will watch it with you, and we will have a good time. 

Rewatched on: May 31, 2026

Rating: ★★★★½ / 5

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I drove two hours and twenty-three minutes to eat pancakes in New Hampshire last weekend, because somebody (Ranjani) told me it was a nice place. It was going to be my birthday activity and that plan was derailed, but the silver lining is that I had two passengers come along. I ENJOYED my time at Polly's Pancake Parlor, and I would in fact wait 53 minutes to be seated once again. But that's just me. 

The drive up to Franconia, NH is so pretty, and I look forward to doing it again in October when the fall colors are at their peak. We did a short (but not tooo easy) hike at Artists Bluff, and I will go back and complete the 1.5 mile loop next time. 

The next day I did a much more local and much more low-key hike-walk at Mainstone Farm. We saw frogs! I also found myself at another concert, but that deserves a longer post. 

Last week I played badminton, which was good, and I ate a strawberry peach tart, which was GOOD. 

Bye for now. It's time to play Dispatch. 

Breakfast of Losers (Champions)

 

Taking a break from our (not) regularly scheduled movie posts to talk about a book I finished a little while ago now. 

 

It used to be a big secret but is now not much of a secret that I am in 2 going on 3 book clubs. I guess this book club which I call the Carlton Book Club or Ethan's Book Club or the Finance Book Club or my Discord Book Club is the "main" one. Of the 3-ish clubs, this is the one that feels the most like a commitment. We read 20-30 pages every week and then we DISCUSS. And even when I loathe the book we choose, I've always finished it anyway (at least up until now). 

 

From the end of March through the beginning of June, we read Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, which means that some of my friends have been hearing me complain and/or sing this book's praises since I started it many months ago at this point. Combo of travel and moving and concerts and no audiobook and p e r s o n a l life things had me falling wayyy behind, but I caught up in time for our final discussion and I'm done. Yippee! Me and Breakfast of Champs went on a real journey. 

 

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Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

 

It was kind of love-at-first-chapter for me and Kurt Vonnegut. Something about the way he writes and his specific brand of cynicism really worked for me from the start. He speaks to my brain in a way that few classic authors have so far. I'd read Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle and maybe even all of his graduation speeches and letters written to high school fans. He just seems like a weird guy with cool thoughts. I think I could become a fan too. 

 

Vonnegut is so weird, I could tell that very early on, but he sees the world in a really interesting way. Both of the main characters, Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout, are depressing self-inserts in different ways. Trout, in particular, is a science fiction writer who comes up with the wackiest fucking concepts in the same way that Breakfast of Champions is a wacky fucking book. I will be thinking about Dwayne Hoover and Hawaiian Week every time I see a car dealership from now on. 

 

I loved the beginning of this book and the setup a lot, but the culmination of everything just felt so gross to me, and I KNOW that's the point, but that doesn't mean I have to be on board. I knew this book was going to feel pointless, but it was so much more pointless than I could've anticipated. It feels like a whole lot of nothing, but it's nothing that I want to read more of.

 

Consider this a highly-entertained 3 stars. I enjoyed reading this book and I feel positively about it, but do I think it's good? What is it even about??  We-are-all-machines-and-the-story-has-already-been-written-and-nothing-matters-because-the-author-of-the-story-is-god. Vonnegut doesn't seem like a very religious guy to me, but I think that's his thesis here. (He should meet my good friend Joe Abercrombie. They would make an extra depressing duo.)

 

Half of my book club friends are haters. They believe Breakfast of Champions has too many tangents. But to me, the tangents ARE the book; it would be nothing without them. Just Breakfast without the Champions <insert sad Walt Jr. image here>. It's fair to not like that style, but I think they're wrong anyway (though I too could do with a couple hundred fewer words about penises and beavers). 

 

My notes are currently split between two kindles, my phone, and my physical copy. There are way too many great quotes in this book for me to highlight all of them, but here's one snippet in particular that I think I'll remember for a long time: 

 

He said he knew that his truck was turning the atmosphere into poison gas, and that the planet was being turned into pavement so his truck could go anywhere. "So I'm committing suicide," he said... "My brother is even worse," the driver went on. "He works in a factory that makes chemicals for killing plants and trees in Viet Nam... In the long run, he's committing suicide," said the driver. "Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way."

Depressing and thought provoking. I spend many hours each week working at a company that is doing cool technology things, but are these cool technology things going to have a good impact on the planet in the long run? And if the planet dies, what are the humans going to do? Option 1: die. Option 2: send Ryland Grace to space. 

 

Read: May 30, 2026

Rating: ★★★ / 5